


Caged Oceans

by LadyOfHell



Series: Original Statements [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Aquariums, Gen, Horror, Or at least an attempt at horror, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), Season/Series 01, Season/Series 02, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-17 06:46:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29467458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyOfHell/pseuds/LadyOfHell
Summary: Statement of Gwendolyn Collins, regarding her phobia of aquariums and the time spent in an unusual pet store.
Series: Original Statements [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2166756
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Caged Oceans

**Author's Note:**

> Okay guys, this is my first fic here. And my first attempt at horror.  
> This is based on my real life phobia. Yes, I'm kind of afraid of aquariums, I don't know why.  
> It's just a statement, so I guess a timeframe isn't that relevant for this one, but I would put it in late season one or maybe season two.  
> I'm actually not completely sure about the entities at work here, but I guess a Vast/Corruption team-up fits best.  
> Also, english is not my first language, so please excuse grammatical errors.

"Alright..." the Archivist says and looks at the pale woman that sits opposite of him. "Statement of Gwendolyn Collins, regarding... what exactly?"  
She smiles shyly at him. "A strange pet shop and... well, terrifying aquariums, I guess."  
"Alright", he repeats, seemingly unfazed by her strange explaination. "Statement taken directly from subject. Statement begins."  
She bites her lips and avoids his gaze, staring at the tape recorder that lies on the table between them. "I don't really know where to start this. I mean... it happend fairly recently and I'm still having nightmares and I wake up in the middle of the night too scared to move, but at the same time, I feel so silly. This is about aquariums. Aquariums. These aren't like spiders or cemetaries or whatever else scares normal people. I'm talking about glass containers where you keep fish in. They are not scary.  
I've always had a strange relationship with them. I'd love to cite some childhood trauma now, to justify this strange fear, but there's nothing I could tell you. I always kind of liked them, but in the same way you like a scary movie. The shiver you feel while watching something terrifying that can't actually hurt you.  
My hometown has a zoo. My parents took me there countless times and I liked the aquarium part the most. It was objectively beautiful. The lights were low and the walls were painted black, to accelerate the effect of the aquariums, which were glowing in a blue tinted light. The exotic fish sparkled in every imaginable colour and their eyes looked cold and dead. I remember, how my heart sped up everytime I entered the aquarium area, how I felt the shivers deep down to my bones. One aquarium was incredibly large, my stomach dropped whenever I looked into it. I guess you could compare it to the thrill you feel in a haunted house or on a rollercoaster. I loved it so much.  
The dreams are not as pleasant. I compared looking at aquariums to watching a horror movie. The dreams are more like... being part of the movie. Like I'm the protagonist that is about to get murdered by some chainsaw-wielding psycho. I don't have them very often, fortunately. But every once in a while I dream about... well... caged water. And I wake up terrified. Wow, saying it out loud makes it even more embaressing.  
The details of the dreams change, of course. Sometimes it's about one aquarium, sometimes there are multiple ones. They can be empty or filled with dirty water or without any light or glowing dimly in a dark room. It doesn't really matter, it all seems to scare me equally. But like I said, it only happend once in a while and it was fine.  
All of it was fine, actually. It may have been a phobia, but a very mild one. I wasn't gripped by a paralyzing fear whenever I saw an aquarium, it never affected my everyday life in any significant way, so why would I care? I could live with a few bad dreams.  
And to be honest, I started to confront my fear. I met my boyfriend, Henry, I moved in with him and... well, he owned an aquarium. A decently sized freshwater one. Brightly lit, with a lot of plants and small, colourful fish. It stood in the living room, so I had to deal with the thing daily. Of course I told Henry about my phobia and he's a great guy, so he asked me if he should sell it or at least move it to a different room, but I refused. I knew I had to confront myself with this fear at some point in my life, so why not now? And I got better, actually. I mean... I still couldn't look inside the thing once the lights went out. Dark aquariums always terrified my the most. But I fed the fish almost daily and I helped Henry with the cleaning and the water changes. Like I said, the thing was bright and the living room wasn't exactly a threatening environment, so I was never really scared of it, at least not in daylight, but I was still proud of myself. I thought I could get rid of my phobia... but I don't think that's a possibility anymore.  
Enough of that. Now you know about my relationship with... glass boxes. Guess I have to talk about the incident now. It really makes my skin crawl just to think about it, but here we go.  
It happened last saturday. Henry had to work late and he asked me to go to the store and pick up a few things he needed for the aquarium. Nothing special, just a filter medium and some fish food. The usual stuff. I was walking home from work, because I had to get home first, to get the car and drive to the pet store. God, I should have just driven to that chain pet store. But no, I was walking down a street, about halfway between my workplace and my home, when I saw that small store. I've never seen it before, although I walk that street every day twice, but I thought I simply hadn't paid any attention to it. It was certainly inconspicuous enough to miss it. A pale front, that was no different from the other stores on each side. The big window was made of frosted glass, so you couldn't see inside. The sign was white and black letters in a simple calibri font just said Aquaristics. Nothing else, no real name or something. Just Aquaristics. And a small sign on the door that said open. It wasn't creepy or anything. In fact, it was almost painfully normal in every possible way.  
Seeing the store was a pleasant surprise. I guess you know that, but driving in London ist hell and I absolutely wasn't looking forward to it, especially because I only needed two things. So of course I went in to quickly pick up the stuff for Henry. I had a stressful day at work and I just wanted to go home and lie down on the sofa, so the possibility of not having to drive around was quite appealing to me.  
The shop was empty when I went in. I didn't think about it at this point, the door had no bell and maybe the cashier was in the back area or something and didn't notice me entering. So I decided to care about it once I found the stuff I needed. Maybe I would find them somewhere in the store while I was shopping.  
I started to search through the shelves, but I didn't find what I was looking for. Everything in the front area was stuff you need for saltwater aquariums and my boyfriend had a freshwater one. For a moment I thought that this store was specialized on saltwater and didn't sell what I needed. I considered leaving, also because the air inside the store was very hot and humid and I found it hard to breathe. Of course, that was kind of normal for aquaristic stores, but, thinking back to it, the entire front area didn't have a single aquarium, so they had no real reason to go without air conditioning.  
I was getting ready to leave when my eyes fell upon a... passage, I guess. About the size of a standard door, although it had no door. There was just the threshold and above it was a blue glowing sign that said Freshwater. I realized that I was simply looking in the wrong department and even when the room behind the passage look darker than the front, I didn't think twice about it and stepped over the threshold.  
Don't get me wrong, when I said darker, I meant only a little. Like when you buy a wrong lightbulb and the light isn't quite as bright as before, but it's still... you know... bright. But the room I had just entered was dark enough that my eyes needed a few seconds to get used to the darkness. When I was finally able to see again, I walked up to the first shelf, but it was filled with empty, brand new aquariums. Still not unusual, I guess. They didn't scare me or anything, but I didn't spend a lot of time looking at them and went deeper into the store, assuming I would find my things on one of the other shelves.  
I went behind the first shelf and the room was getting darker the farther I stepped in. I looked up to check if the lights had gone off, but they were glowing steadily in a dim, pale light, like the brightness was completely intentional. I started to feel uneasy. Maybe I wasn't supposed to be back here, it was entirely possible that this area wasn't open for customers and I had just wandered in an unfinished part of the store. So I decided to quickly check the shelves in the isle I was in and just leave after that.  
I focused on the shelves now and only then I realized that they were completely empty. No items, no pricetags, just a thick layer of dust which I could see in the dim light. Now I was sure I wasn't supposed to be here. I hurried around the shelf, my only priority was getting out of this shop, but when I went around the corner, the door was gone.  
That was the moment I panicked. For just a second I thought that maybe I went in the wrong direction, so I turned around, but the exit was nowhere to be seen. That was entirely impossible, of course, because there hadn't been a door in the first place, only a threshold, so there was no way the door could have fallen shut or something. Still I grasped that small hope and started to touch the wall, frantically searching for a doorknob, but there was nothing to find except stone cold concrete.  
I was too scared to scream. Like I could make something aware of my presence if I didn't keep quiet, and like that would be a bad thing. My heart pounded almost painfully fast in my chest and the black concrete wall didn't move, so I slowly took the first steps deeper inside the shop. I knew that something was terribly wrong, but there was a faint blue glow coming from farther inside and I thought that maybe I could find an emergency exit somewhere. All I knew was that I had to get out of there as fast as possible.  
I stepped around the empty shelves I had looked at earlier and there I saw the first aquariums. They were small and glowing with a faint blue light and I found myself involuntarily stepping closer to have a look at them. The glass was dirty, with specks of mould on the edges and that itself made my skin crawl. I turned away and immediatly faced another aquarium. A bigger one this time. It had no plants inside, only a little bit of gravel that didn't even remotly cover the bottom, as well as a few rocks and pale grey tubes. The whole decoration – if you could even call it that – was overgrown with algae and even though I could see a filter, the water stood eerily still. Eventually the long, thin arms of the algae began to swing ever so slightly from left to right and back again. My heart was racing at this point, something in my mind screamed at me to run, but I couldn't bring myself to turn away from what I was watching. I just knew there had to be fish in there and I was scanning the whole aquarium, searching for them. Then, suddenly, there was movement and for the fracture of a second I found myself relieved, when I saw a fish come out of one of the tubes. But the fish was pale and his colours were faded and his eyes were cold and white and dead when he floated livelessly in the algae ridden water. His rotten fins got caught in the algae's twig-thin arms and I was hit by a sudden wave of nausea, which caused me to bend over and vomit on the floor.  
After I had emptied my stomach, I managed to walk deeper inside. Maybe that was stupid, I don't know, it just took so much effort not to look at the aquarium again. My head was hurting like hell, I had clutched my hands together to stop the trembling and my eyes were focused on the black floor to ignore the aquariums as much as possible. I was still hoping to find an exit, but that seemed even more unlikely then before. All I knew was that I had to get away from these aquariums and so I started running through the black corridors.  
I only stopped when I bumped into glass. At first I thought I had reached a wall, because in front of me was only darkness, but I was sure I felt glass under my fingertips. I didn't get any time to process it though, because suddenly, there was movement right in front of my eyes. Another fish, a bigger one this time, bigger than my head, but just like the first one he was pale and dead and rotten and his empty eyes just stared at me. He didn't move, didn't float, didn't breath, just stood painfully still.  
And then, the lights went on.  
The aquarium was way to large, it was impossible for it to exist inside this small store. It was only half full, the water had a pale green colour, cloudy from algae, I couldn't even see the body of the rotting fish, only his disgusting, dead face. The upper half of the aquarium was made of blue painted tiles, but the colour was chipping off and revealed the dirty grey underneath. And there was so much mould. On the walls and on the ceiling and floating on top of the water and where there was no mould, the water's surface was shimmering oily.  
I stared at it, unable to move and I felt like I was inside that glass cage. The hot, humid air felt like tar in my lungs. I felt warm, slimey water against my skin, patches of mould brushing against me, things that touched my legs were hidden in the cloudy water, but I knew they were dead and their bodies were just floating by. And I was falling, deeper and deeper into the endless pale green abyss until I was rotten like the fish and I would float beside them, back and forth inside a glass box, but never reaching its cold walls, until my body would be a part of the algae-plagued water.  
I was hit by the nausea again and the fish was still staring at me and a stared back. For just one more moment, I was to terrified to move. Then, I simply turned around an ran back in the direction I had come from. I'd rather sit between empty shelves forever than look inside this aquarium for one more second.  
I ran as fast as I could, again looking at the floor and nothing else. I still had trouble breathing and I was shaking like crazy, but somehow I managed not to trip over my own feet. When I finally reached the shelves, I couldn't believe my eyes. The door had reappeared. I didn't even question it at that point, I just stumbled through it, back in the light of the front area of the store and then out of the store itself as quickly as possible. There was still no cashier around, I think, but I didn't pay much attention to that.  
I threw the door open and the moment I felt the cold november air on my face, I cried with relieve. I was dizzy and expected to collapse on the street, but after a few minutes the dizziness and nausea faded and I was at least capable of walking home.  
I told Henry the whole story. He didn't believe me, of course, talked something about panic attacks and how experiences always seem worse in retrospect, especially involving a phobia. But he agreed to throw his aquarium out when I asked him to. I didn't step in the living room until he got rid of it last wednesday.  
I still walk to work everyday, but I take another route now. I don't think I could look at this cursed store again. To be honest, I don't know what would be worse. That it just disappeared like some ghost or hallucination. Or that it is still there. Waiting for me to enter again."  
The woman sighs, some of the tension seems to leave her body. "Wow, that was quite a monologue. Sorry."  
"That's perfectly fine, Miss Collins", the Archivist reassures her. "Your case is certainly interesting; we're going to look into it. Would you like us to inform you...?"  
"No!", she interrupts him. "I don't want to hear anything about this anymore."  
"That's understandable. Still, thank you for bringing this information here."  
"Your welcome." She smiles wryly, rises from her chair and goes for the door when she stops and turns to the Archivist once again. "Will the nightmares stop anytime soon?", she asks and dreads the answer.  
It takes him a moment to answer. "Maybe you should see a therapist."  
"You're probably right", she agrees tiredly. "Goodbye."

A few days later, the Archivist starts the tape recorder again. "Supplemental", he states. "Sadly, there wasn't much follow-up to be done in Miss Collins case. According to multiple websites and search engines, there is no pet store on the street she talked about. I sent Tim there, just to be sure, but apparently he walk the whole street up and down twice and couldn't find a single pet store or any other shop that would match Miss Collins description.  
It would be easy to dismiss the statement as a hyperrealistic nightmare of somebody with a severe phobia. Two things strike me as odd though. On the day of Miss Collins incident, two people entirely unrelated to her posted on their social media pictures of a shop that match her description, asking if it was new and why it didn't have a name. And secondly, a quick phone call with her boyfriend, Mr. Henry Beckett, confirmed that Miss Collins left work at two pm like usual, but arrived home later than him, at about six pm. He wasn't worried because he thought she was shopping. An assumption which, as it seems, wasn't entirely wrong.  
I guess I can't write all these facts off as a simple coincidence. As impossible as it may sound, I just have to assume that Miss Collins was, in fact, trapped in her personal hellscape in the back area of a nonexistent store for four hours.  
End recording."

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, that's it, I hope you liked it.  
> Thanks for reading :)


End file.
